Textile treatment compositions suitable for providing fabric softening and static control benefits during laundering are well-known in the art and have found wide-scale commercial application. Conventionally, rinse-added fabric softening compositions contain, as the active softening component, substantially water-insoluble cationic materials having two long alkyl chains. Typical of such materials are di-stearyl di-methyl ammonium chloride and imidazolinium compounds substituted with two stearyl groups. These materials are normally prepared in the form of a dispersion in water and it is generally not possible to prepare such aqueous dispersions with more than about 10% of cationic materials without encountering intractable problems of product viscosity and stability, especially after storage at elevated temperatures, such that the compositions are unpourable and have inadequate dispensing and dissolving characteristics in rinse water. This physical restriction on softener concentration naturally limits the level of softening performance achievable without using excessive amounts of product, and also adds substantially to the costs of distribution and packaging. Accordingly it would be highly desirable to prepare physically-acceptable textile treatment compositions containing much higher levels of water-insoluble cationic softener materials.
It would also be desirable to have fabric softeners which are storage-stable, but which are biodegradable. However, materials which may be biodegradable are often insufficiently stable to formulate as liquid compositions.
It is an object of this invention to provide storage-stable, biodegradable fabric softeners. It is a further objective to provide such materials in the form of liquid products, concentrates, and in sheet form for use in clothes dryers. These and other objects are obtained herein, as will be seen from the following disclosure.